Osomo's Mistake, pt. 1

"I challenge you to a duel of honor."

I wanted to respond to that. Dueling is something I can do well - not as dangerously as a true Iron Lion, but as effectively anyways. This was my game.

Instead, I decided that trying not to suffocate underneath a thousand pounds of bricks and bystanders was a better idea.

As it turned out, it wasn't, because Osomo (Osomo!) decided to speak instead.

"I'll defend your honor for 250 in gold."

I wanted to respond to that. I decided that trying not to laugh instead was a better eidea.

A woman's voice, sounding not flustered enough to lose her haughty cool, answered him. "Does it look as if I carry that much in gold?"

(Osomo again. "Half?") "Fifty." ("Only fifty?")

Chitin pulled himself out of the pile, and I had a precious moment of sunlight and air before the pile caved in on me to fill his void.

It was enough time for the woman to finish speaking. I recognized the accent: Serpentine. "My bodyguard is-" (Osomo interrupted: "He's dying.") "You're a four-arm I know nothing about."

Osomo sighed. "Fifty now."

I heard leather slap and money jingle as a coinpurse got tossed. Then, with a hard push upwards, I mananged to pull myself up into a sitting position, with my head above the rubble. Just in time to see what happened next.

Osomo responded, as is his nature, in the usual fashion.

He stepped backwards and reached under his cloak, tossed his hooded head back, and pulled his arms back out with four of his custom-ordered crossbows.

Then he fired them all.

My eyes shifted, and for the first time I saw the circumstances. The woman was indeed lithene, and dressed well enough to be from Embassy City. Just in the background was Serpentine, lying face-down in a spreading pool of blood.

Most importantly was the challenger. His race was unimportant. What was important was his outfit:

Plate armor. At least six ribs on each side of the cuirass. Specialty work, in other words, and expensive enough that the owner inside was clearly Noblesse.

Nobody wears armor like that casually, not even in Cloudbirth. And nobody ever wears just plate armor. The plates are over full mail, and the mail goes over an inch-thick layer of felt. All of that is over a layer of silk.

The silk layer is for use after battles. When you have a spare moment, you grab the hems of the silk and padding and you yank them. This causes all the missiles that pincushion your armor to pop out.

Two of them hit ARMOR square in the chest - and harmlessly. One of them shattered on his armor.

The fourth bolt went wide, and I saw what was going to happen a split second before it hit a passer-by.

If it's any comfort, I don't think she felt any pain. It was a clean hit between the eyes, with one of the special quarrels that Osomo had gone to great pains to buy.

The shafts were filled with some chemical - naphtha resin, I think - that made them explode and burn on impact. Which it did, a split second before her corpse flew past me and knocked down what was left of the scaffolding.

Before I was buried under the rest of the scaffolding, I took a moment to sigh.